White Pages was home # listings. Yellow Pages was business listings.
For many cities they were the same book.
Same book, but still color separated with business in yellow and residential in white.
My city was big enough that we had to have two separate books, nyah, nyah.
So was mine. Lol. I’m just old enough that I got around and saw books from other places.
Fair enough. My hometown is densely populated.
You were asked if you wanted to be listed or not.
Yes, but even then it was generally only true for the remaining fixed landline phones. Felt just like a public knowledge part of your address, like putting your name on the doorbell button.
To be generally valid for mobile phones you probably would have to go back another 10 years.
Those truely were different times still, also online.
I even remember posting my mail address to a public register at the end of the 90s to distribute the public part of my pgp key…Removed by mod
That name sounds like a Power Rangers villain.
My mom saves up all her junk mail, and takes it to a neighborhood shredding event 2 or 3 times a year. She gets distressed if she misses it. She doesn’t understand why I just toss it all away.
I’ve asked her why she thinks her junk mail address is so valuable, and she’s afraid they will fall into the wrong hands. I’ve explained to her that if it’s on junk mail, it’s already out there being sold. It’s just her name and address, it’s a public record.
I get why she’d want to shred stuff with her SS# on it, but another AARP solicitation?
Be a good child now and buy your mom a shredder
She’s got one, but she thinks the trucks will shred better, and the shreds wont be in her trash where people will know where they came from.
I should note that my mother lives in a gated, active adult community, and there is literally ZERO crime in her neighborhood. If someone started going through someone else’s trash, you’d have a half a dozen busybodies demanding to know what you’re up to.
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3 big trucks, and three lanes of cars, pull up, pop the trunk, guy takes out the boxes and bags from the back and tosses them into bins, that are later emptied into the trucks, and you drive away.
And trust they really do pulp your papers without sifting through for the good stuff.
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The Yellow and White Pages were a private business, and they sold the listings in the Yellow Pages, and also sold upgraded listings in the White Pages. Residential listings were free.
Then they’d drive around and drop them on peoples’ front steps. I knew people that made extra cash at Phone Book Delivery Season.
There were also competing Yellow Pages by upstart companies, especially smaller local Yellow Pages. You might have the big giant book that was the whole city/county, and then have a smaller set for just your suburb. A small local business might spring for an decent ad in the local Yellow Pages, and just put a simple listing on the big one.
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wait lol, if she thinks her address is so valuable for strangers to steal, wouldn’t that make tossing it somewhere other than home more risky? Not that there’s much thought going into this routine.
I’m in the habit of shredding everything.
a) It’s so fun to watch a stack of mailers turn into confetti
b) Deniability. If I only shred important documents, then all my shredded trash is now important. If I shred everything, nobody knows how much of it is important.
Mostly A though. I’m not yet worried about someone trying to reconstruct my shredded trash.
Very paranoid. I like it.
You could opt-out of those. And it was pretty reliable to do so.
After I left one school to go to a vo-tech, I looked up the phone number for a girl I liked in the previous school who turned me down for a date. It was the only time I had ever asked a girl out. I had to go through 6 numbers before I found her, we ended up dating for three years.
I had a cell phone and ditched my landline in 2003. Those weren’t listed. Gotta go back 3 more years! (For me anyway)
